Suburban explorer

Hope everybody had a lovely Memorial Day weekend!

Saturday I had a Gillian's Island ride - what was supposed to be a short cruise ended up being twice as long. It was a beautiful sunny day, and I thought I'd take Cersei and go for a quick 5 mile ride down by the lake. I got Dixie to slog through the mud by the lakeshore for a bit, and her boots got totally covered in muck. They stayed on, but we bailed up to the levee pretty quickly - there's a lot of mosquitos by that lake. And I'm not saying that in the "I moved to Nevada and now I'm a wuss about mosquitos" way, I mean that in the "I'm from Memphis and damn, dude, there's a lot of mosquitos there!" way. Those mosquitos are slow moving critters, so if you stay at a trot you'll outrun them most of the time.

We did the usual quarter of the lakeshore, then crossed LV Rd and came back up a hardpacked 4 wheeler path that parallels the road. The footing was pretty terrible but Dixie managed to rack most of the way up to Nectar. There was a lady pulled off the road there, clearly waiting for us, so we rode on up to see who she was. Turns out it was D, a friend of a friend (friend of several unconnected friends, actually), and she realized that I must be me because I was all tacked up in mismatched endurance gear racking on a big spotty horse. There just aren't very many people who fit that description around here ;)

We talked for a bit, and she was like "oh you should come to my house and get the animals a drink of water; it's two blocks up the street; just follow me." I agreed! I'd even been by her house once, with ~C, and I vaguely knew what it looked like. So she drove off and we followed, and then she turned but I didn't quite see where she turned, and I spent the next 45 minutes wandering up and down the streets of the subdivision. It's not even a very big subdivision, so I'm pretty disgusted that I lost her like that. Sigh.

Pro:

• My horse is awesome. She was cool as a cucumber about the dogs, kids, other horses, loud peacock, and general aimless wandering.

Con:

• My horse is kind of a tard and spooked hugely, twice, at cracks in the road. Cracks that looked to my untrained eye exactly like every other crack, but clearly contained a portal to hell or something. Full stop, arch neck, WHUFFFF noise, evil eye.
• I'm kind of a tard and got really sunburned.
• I never found D's house. All the houses started to really look the same after a while. I thought I had her phone number, but I have it somewhere in email, not saved to my phone. I even called ~C to ask her where D lived, but C was off in the boonies of Nevada and didn't answer.

Eventually, the dog and I got really hot so we gave up and headed back to Dixie's subdivision. Once I got on her street, I got kind of confused again - there were tons of trucks parked on the street! And trailers. And some dude riding an Andalusian stud down the street. And ... cows? Turns out the neighbors a block down were having some kind of backyard cow event - roping or cutting or something. It was surreal.